Page 20 of Proof By Contradiction
When I’m by myself, it’s worse. Alone in the shower at seven in the morning, hand working, the hot water scalding my back, and the script runs without asking my permission.
Haldrey at the whiteboard. Haldrey is leaning over me at a desk. Haldrey’s hand flat on the small of my back, pushing me forward over a surface—any surface, he’s not picky in my head, he barely is in my head, he’s a mouth and a pair of glasses and the Lancashirecorrectand a neck-tendon moving.
I come with one palm flat against the tiles and the water gone cold and a name on the inside of my teeth.
Sex with others doesn’t fix it. It feeds it. Each bloke, each mouth, each orgasm: not him.
Seven hook-ups in twelve days. The volume escalating, the pattern replicating, the result identical.
I’ve got the staff page bookmarked.Dr Laurence Haldrey—Lecturer in Mathematics. The photograph is old, taken against a bookshelf, and in it, he isn’t smiling; he is patient in the way someone is when they’ve been told this is going to take two minutes.
PhD Cambridge. Thesis on something I don’t understand about real analysis and sigma algebras.
Two papers. A book chapter in a Routledge anthology, which I looked up at the university bookshop. I’ve read hisacknowledgementspage, which is forty words long and mentions a dog named Beckett and a mother in Lancaster and no one else, and those forty words have taken up more real estate in my head this week than anything I was supposed to be reading for the course.
By now, I know he wears one fold on his sleeves when he’s in a good mood and two when he’s tired. I know he arrives at the theatre at nine ten, not nine. I know the way he caps his marker, left-hand, without looking. I know he never leaves early.
My phone rings.
A call, not a text.
At quarter past eleven on a Monday night, on the top deck of the 142, with Manchester sliding past orange and wet.
My brother.
For half a second, I think about letting it ring out. He’ll think I’m asleep. He’ll send a text in the morning like he always does after an unanswered call:catch up when you’re free, no rush,and I’ll reply at some point, and we’ll both pretend nothing happened.
Then I swipe green, no reason attached. Maybe because not answering is another small choice I’ve depleted myself defending.
‘Ron.’
‘You’re up late.’
No hello, no warm-up. Ronan doesn’t do warm-ups. He’s in a kitchen somewhere, fridge humming, clock ticking, a house where other people have gone to bed. Probably our mum’s. He’s been staying at hers on weekends since I left; Mum told me that in her last WhatsApp, like it was a neutral piece of information.
‘On the bus.’
‘Where’ve you been.’
‘Library.’
Lie. The inside of my mouth still tastes like somebody else’s skin.
A pause. Ron’s pauses are the part of him I’m most afraid of—a chance to fix it before he has to.
The lie stays.
‘Right,’ he says eventually. ‘Library. Until half past eleven.’
‘It’s a maths course, Ron. Nights are a thing.’
‘I imagine. Mum wants to know if you’re eating.’
‘I’m eating.’
‘Actual meals.’
‘Beans on toast is an actual meal in this country, Ron.’
